Widespread Panic

This year's Forecastle Festival was a success despite extreme weather. Due to heavy rains leading up to the festival, the rising Ohio River threatened the structure of stages close to the water. A windstorm on Friday shut down headliner Sam Smith's performance early and caused a two-hour delay on Saturday. Throughout the weekend, however, the extreme heat was the talk of most festivalgoers. Thankfully, the crew hosting the event was phenomenal.

Not many music ensembles stand the test of time. Most can’t even handle the road… 29 years now, Widespread Panic has been king of the road. Located in a considerably small municipality, the Arkansas Music Pavilion played host to a smorgasbord of colorful ‘spreadnecks’, some who have been on tour with the band all spring and summer and were more than proud to tell tale of a moment at a previous show.

Quickly becoming one of the most anticipated music festivals in the nation, The Forecastle Festival is back for another big year with headlining acts Sam Smith, My Morning Jacket, and Widespread Panic down on the waterfront in Louisville, Kentucky on July 17-19. Other promising performances include Modest Mouse, Cage the Elephant, The War On Drugs, Tweedy, Houndmouth, and Portugal. The Man. The festival will also feature several late night shows including Talib Kweli and The Floozies.

Seminal band Widespread Panic has announced the September 25th release of Street Dogs, their long-awaited twelfth studio album on Vanguard Records. Panic recorded Street Dogs as a band, live in the studio, for the first time. The result is the most fun the veteran sextet has had making an album, which is apparent upon first listen.

North Coast Music Festival (NCMF) is thrilled to announce WIDESPREAD PANIC as the surprise headliner for this year’s festival! The legendary Southern rock jam band has remained in Pollstar’s Top 50 Tours of the Year for the past decade, and continues to be one of the most relevant touring entities on the live music scene after almost 30 years. 2015 marks a special year for the band as they announced the release of their first studio album in five years.

Widespread Panic’s nearly thirty-year-old traveling carnival of crunched-out jam rock is a spectacle that’s anchored by a faithful following that grows with each seasonal tour. Crafted in the shrieking southern-rock of the Allman Brothers Band and the improvisational mastery of the Grateful Dead, Panic resides among the upper echelon of jam bands, and they’re built to last.

It’s hard to use the term super-group without a couple of obvious stigmas surfacing. It usually constitutes musicians who were sensationalized with other bands coming together to benefit off of the novelty of their collaboration with other already successful players. Often the results are under-inspired, a lucrative opportunity to make a quick buck off of an established name. Not every band assembled of already established players constitutes super group.